A home at the end of the world - By Michael Cunningham Page 0,33
elderly life. But now, as if for the first time, lying beside Ned, I could see the boyish crook of his elbow under the pillow, the young muscles of a chest gone hairy and slack. Poor thing, I thought. Poor boy.
I reached over to stroke his shoulder. I might have kissed him. I might have let my hand stray down to the lush tangle of his chest. But my new sense of his innocent beauty was still too delicate. If he awoke and kissed me hard, if he mauled my ribs, it might collapse altogether. So I contented myself with watching him, and petting the soft, furred mound of his shoulder.
BOBBY
M Y FATHER has bought himself a new pair of glasses—aviator style, with spindly pink-gold rims. He comes to my bedroom door and poses there, one elbow crooked jauntily against the frame.
“Bobby, what do you think?” he asks.
“Huh?” I say. I’ve been lying in the dark with the headphones on, smoking a joint and listening to Jethro Tull. The music has scooped out my thoughts and I need a few minutes to reenter the world of cause and effect.
“Bobby, what do you think?” he asks again.
“I don’t know,” I answer eventually. He will have to give me more time with the question.
My father points to his head. He is standing in light. Hundred-watt rays stream around him, cut through the dusk of my room.
What do I think of his head? It is in fact an expansive question, probably beyond my scope.
“Well,” I say. I let the syllable hang.
“My glasses,” he says. “Bobby, I got new glasses today.”
A stitch of time passes. He says, “What do you think? Are they a little young for me?”
“I don’t know,” I say. I can hear how foolish I sound; how empty. But I am helpless before his questions. He might as well be an angel, posing riddles.
He sighs, a slow punctured hissing sound. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll start dinner.”
“Good, Dad,” I say, in a voice I hope comes out cheerful and cooperative. I check with myself—is it his night or mine to make dinner? This is Tuesday. His. I have got that right.
Only after he’s removed his shape from the doorway do I realize his questions were simple ones. He’s traded in his tortoiseshells for a racier model, and wants reassurance. I should follow him to the kitchen, start the conversation over. But I don’t do that. I collapse under the weight of my own self-interest, and permit myself a return to the music and the dark.
Sometime later, my father calls me to dinner. He has made chopped steak and squares of frozen hash browns. He sips Scotch from a glass decorated with pictures of orange slices round and evenly spoked as wagon wheels.
We eat for a while without talking. Once they’ve established themselves, our silences are hard to break. They are tough and seamless as shrink-wrap. Finally I say, “Those glasses look okay. I mean, I like them.”
“I think they’re probably a bit too young,” he says. “I suspect a man my age probably looks a little foolish in glasses like these.”
“Naw. All kinds of people wear that kind. They look fine.”
“Do you honestly think so?”
“Uh-huh,” I say.
“Well,” he says. “I’m glad to hear that. I’m glad to have a younger person’s opinion on the subject.”
“They do. They look, you know, real nice.”
“Good.”
Silverware clicks against the plates. I can hear the action of my father’s throat, swallowing.
For weeks now, he has been dyeing his hair. He is on a strand-by-strand agenda—every few days, he dyes a few more. In this way he hopes to present the change as natural, as if time had reversed itself against his personal will.
This is his solution—to age in big-collared shirts and leather vests, to try every combination of mustache, beard, and sideburns. I’ve seen him in the old courtship pictures, big-armed in T-shirts, a meandering, hard-drinking musician who bumped up against the limits of his own talent and fell in love with a farm woman, a widow who knew about seeds and harvest.
Then I remember. It comes to me: today is the anniversary. It is two years ago today.
He replenishes his drink from the Ballantine bottle and says, “Let me ask you another question.”